I bought and installed i7-8700k on Asrock Z370 Pro4. Worked perfectly and the board / cpu passed all our stress tests but performance I was impressed with was poor compared to Asus boards per Passmark..

so I bought an Asus Rog Strix Z370-G. The i7-8700k booted up fine with this new board and I installed NVidia drivers. Everything worked perfectly.

I then went onto the Passmark site to test the combo of the better board / i7-8700k. no overclock.

About 2/3rd through the test I got one of those Intel screens saying something wrong , saving info and rebooting you. I have had them before infrequently particularly with Asus boards.

But the machine now would not reboot! All the lights on the MB come on and the light on the wired mouse comes on but the keyboard does not activate.

I tried the obvious. Different video and different power source. No luck.

I assumed it was the new Asus mother board BUT....

after I installed back on the Asrock board machine EXACTLY the same problem. Bear in mind I had taken the i7-8700K out of this machine and left it alone but for removing the CPU. I then installed the CPU back to the previously working machine.

Same thing. Could not get the keyboard working.

I have ordered another i7-8700k now they are more freely available but I have two motherboards needing them and only one working i7-8700K after it arrives.

NOW I have never had either an Intel or an AMD CPU fail and never issues coming on in mid stream as above!!!

So Two questions......

1.) Is the i7-8700K reliable and stable or is the above problem the tip of the iceberg? Alternatively is it know that Asus Rog Strix boards KILL the i7-8700K? I run a business with about 20 computers and servers all mission critical.

A lot of them are VPro which we use but this is the first VPro K machine. We plan to swap to q370 boards when they come out to use the built in VPro.

2.) Is there anything else to try I have over looked before returning the Dead CPU to Newegg?

Rose5685: Thank you very much for contacting the Intel® Processors communities. We will do our best to provide the information you are looking for.

In regard to your inquiry, there are no known issues reported for this processor, it very stable and reliable, also there are no reports of ASUS boards affecting this unit. Even though the processor is an excellent processor, there are some isolated cases where the unit might be defective that is why Intel provides 3 years of warranty on them.

In reference to troubleshoot steps to try, we normally recommend to test the PC with the very basic configuration, meaning with just the power supply, board, processor one memory stick, and in this case without the video card, to rule out a possible problem with one of the memory sticks or with the video card itself. Additionally, once you get the other processor you can always test it on both boards to confirm if the issue persists.